https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk_NbaXm6Lw

Transcript:

When I was in grade 8 we were given an assignment to pick a historical event to do a presentation on in front of the class. We were allowed to choose from a selection of options that our teacher had picked and they all seemed to depict some morally reprehensible event that we were supposed to learn something from.

From the pre-approved list we could choose from topics like, the Salem witch trials, the Spanish inquisition, the crusades, and the Galileo affair. You’re probably picking up on a theme here.

Each of these events, along with others, persist in the popular subconscious of the modern world as examples of some person or group of persons that we’ve refashioned into our own likeness being victimized by the backwardness of their day.

We say things like, “they were ahead of their time,” and by that we mean that they were closer to the sensibilities of our time than where they found themselves. What being born later has to do with being “ahead” of anybody escapes my ability to understand, but that’s an aside.

So what is the story of Galileo. Galileo, as we all know, was an astronomer who put forward an idea known as heliocentrism which is the idea that the Earth rotates around the sun which stands in contrast to Geocentrism which is the idea that everything revolves around the Earth.

And Geocentrism was the popular belief in the day because of superstitious religious fundamentalism that scientific men like Galileo were trying to liberate humanity from and sure enough as he began to promote his observations, the Catholic Church jumped in and tried him for heresy in an attempt to keep the masses trapped in their religious worldview.

Something like that is what is popularly believed by anyone familiar with it and for those who aren’t familiar with it, they will still be nurturing some kind of narrative that says Galileo was an innocent free thinker who was unjustly persecuted by the evil Catholic Church.

The fact is, the Church was upholding the geocentric view because it is what had been convincingly demonstrated by the scientific establishment and this consensus was enjoyed beyond the boundaries of Christian culture. Both Ptolemy and Aristotle had argued persuasively in favor of it.

And Galileo had failed to overcome the strongest argument against heliocentrism argued by Aristotle which was that if the Earth circled the sun, we would be able to observe a stellar parallax among the stars as the Earth moved and since we couldn’t observe it, the earth must be static.

And that’s worth pausing on, because my education experience, like the anecdote above, led me to believe that people didn’t know things like the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa because they were basically stupid and we are smarter, more highly evolved, and better looking than they were.

But here we have Aristotle making astronomical observations nearly 2400 years ago and pointing out that if the Earth was moving, we should see a parallax effect in the stars just like we do when we move in proximity to other objects. That’s a very intelligent and very scientific argument.

And because there was convincing scientific evidence in support of Geocentrism, the Catholic Church would often interpret the Bible with that view in mind because the Catholic Church believes in what’s called fides et ratio or faith and reason which is why they were and always have been perfectly happy to interpret divine revelation through the logical lense of evidence offered by non-Christians like Aristotle and Ptolemy.

This wasn’t a case of the Bible against science, it was a case of science against science reinforced by scripture and the prevailing world view of the time. The Church has never been anti-science. The Church was the greatest patron of science and because it cared so much about the pursuit of truth.

The fact is, the Church was so pro-science, so in favour of rational exploration, that to ensure it’s validity, sustainability, and integrity, it held scientific inquiry to the highest standard of scrutiny. That is to say, she would not allow something to be published unless it had been convincingly demonstrated.

In the case of Galileo, even though his theory was true, he had not yet proven it and the Church would not allow something to be taught as if it had been proven when it had not. And not only had it not been proven, many of his premises about the tides and waves in the ocean being evidence of the Earth moving were false and didn’t help his case among his peers in academia.

And we might lament this as a rigid restriction to be placed upon rational inquiry, but look at what has become of science since we lost that kind of serious oversite.

We now rely on journalists to mediate scientific discovery to us in which every headline says, new scientific study suggests [insert claim here]… or a new study says that such and such may be true. It’s virtually never conclusive statements and almost always cherry picked based on its ability to enhance a headline.

Or what about the fact that according to Stanford medical researcher, John Ioannidis, who claims that 90% of medical research that gets published in scientific journals, which are supposed to be the scrutiny that guarantees integrity in science today, is wrong. [1]

That means that only 10% of what gets published as supposed fact is actually factual. The Catholic Church, who established hospitals and universities for the benefit of Europe’s citizens, used to be that guarantor of science. Without that oversite, we’re left with a system that is plagued by the interests of politics and multinational pharmaceutical companies.

The Galileo story is used to reinforce the belief that the Church has always been systematically opposed to science and reason and actively did whatever it could to persecute scientists for fear that their inquiry would compromise their authority and the superstitions that they upheld.

Let’s think about that for a second. The Catholic Church was one of the if not the most dominant authorities in the affairs of Europe for a thousand years. That’s longer than any of the major empires that history records.

If in that time, the Church was actively pursuing an agenda of suppression against scientists and academics, there would be countless cases of this kind. But whenever you ask someone to provide some examples to support this popular narrative, they fall upon the same flimsy handful of cases, of which Galileo is always the first triumphant example to escape their lips.

And in the case of Galileo it’s based on a historical revision.

For comparison’s sake, let’s take a look at what a real systematic persecution of a people by a reining authority looks like. The Soviet Union was an atheistic communist power that ruled over people in Europe and Asia for almost 70 years.

As part of its hope to achieve an atheistic utopia, it persecuted Christians for their belief in God to the tune of estimates as high as 20 million deaths.[2]

That’s a number so incomprehensibly large that it overwhelms our ability to be attentive to any one story from within it. Stalin himself is supposed to have said that 1 death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic.

Let’s say for a second that the popular narrative about Galileo is true and that he really was the victim of the Church’s anti-scientific attitude. The reason his case stands out so vividly is because it is so exceptional. It is a tragedy because it was so rare.

If it happened as often as Christians were murdered by atheists in the 20th century, we’d be desensitized to it. There’d be so many victims that only a staggering statistic could be offered in recognition of their fate. But when there are only a few, we’re able to identify them as exceptional instances of injustice.

The Galileo affair is well known because it is exceptional. It is exceptional because it was rare.

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/20/a-researchers-claim-90-of-medical-research-is-wrong/ 

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union